Reading Group: Readshop *ONLINE*

This community group is held online on Zoom.

Led by poet and Woodland Pattern co-founder Karl Gartung, Readshops are community sessions dedicated to exploring poetry texts from the 20th century that are often labeled “difficult.” Participants take turns reading the poetry aloud, discussing it as questions arise—on the spot, as deeply as needed. No preparation is needed; the only prerequisite is curiosity.

Beginning in January, the group will read Gap Gardening: Selected Poems by Rosmarie Waldrop, which “traces Waldrop’s growing sense of writing as an exploration of what happens in between. Between words, sentences, people, cultures. Between fragment and flow, thinking and feeling, mind and body. For the first time, we have a complete and clear view of the work of a great and inquiring, brave and indispensable poet.” 

Gap Gardening will be followed by Waldrop’s translation of The Book of Questions by Edmond Jabès, “a meditative narrative of Jewish Experience, and, more generally, man's relation to the world… Even though words imply ambiguity and lies, they are the home of the exile. A book becomes the Book, fragments of the law that are in some way unified, where past and present, the visionary, and the common place, encounter each other. For Jabès every word is a question in the book of being. Man defines himself in the world against all that threatens his existence- death, the infinite, silence, that is, God, his primal opponent. How can one speak what cannot be spoken?”

Open to the public. For more details or to join, please contact Programming Director Mike Wendt.